EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: 'the most perfectly autonomous man': Relational Subjectivity and the Crisis of Connection" (original) (raw)

Loneliness is a feminist issue

Feminist Theory, 2022

Loneliness is often described as a deadly epidemic sweeping across the population, a silent killer. Loneliness, we are told, is a social disease that must be cured. But what does it mean to think of loneliness as a feminist issue, and what might a specifically feminist theorisation bring to conceptualisations of loneliness? In this paper, I argue that feminism helps us see that loneliness is not just personal but political. I trace how stories of loneliness surface, circulate, shift and compound within the specificity of the present, centring on recent strategies proposed by the UK government in their 'national mission to end loneliness'. I outline how this policy discourse upholds certain normative attachments as having the promise to alleviate loneliness: coupled love, the family, community. Such framings serve to depoliticise contemporary conditions of loneliness, positioning loneliness as a personal failure, with the cure for loneliness as the responsibility of individuals and communities. Absent in government depictions of the problem of loneliness are the wider mechanisms that condemn people to lonely lives, when infrastructures fail, when people find themselves violently cut off from the world. Finally, I speculate on what might happen if we were to challenge this framing of loneliness as always and only a problem in need of a cure. I seek to uncover some of the political potentials of loneliness, asking what can be learnt through reflecting upon shared experiences of loneliness? For, as feminist politics has shown us, feelings of disaffection and alienation can help us imagine other worlds.

Technology and older adults in British loneliness policy and political discourse

Frontiers in Digital Health, 2023

Introduction: This article provides an analysis of recent loneliness policy and political discourses from the United Kingdom pertaining to older adults. Although government asserts that several groups in society are "at risk" of loneliness, older adults remain the most frequent targets of policy interventions. Technology is positioned as playing a role in the causation and alleviation of loneliness. Little research has examined loneliness in political discourses. Methods: With a focus on how loneliness intersects with themes of technology and aging, this article presents an analysis of discourses guided by Bacchi's What is the Problem Represented to Be (WPR) framework. It endeavors to answer the following questions: What is the problem of loneliness among older adults represented to be, and what is the role of technology in this contextproblem or solution? Results: In the discourses, assertions are made that issues of loneliness, societal change and digital exclusion are intertwined. Lonely older adults are problematized as hard to find and thus connect with interventions, warranting surveillance measures like loneliness heatmaps. Technological interventions to assist older adults in maintaining independence and connections to social networks are often proposed as solutions. The findings indicate dominant discourses position older adults primarily as subjects in need of care and as non-users of technology. Technology is positioned as a cost-effective tool to fill gaps in an overburdened and under-funded social care system that compounds issues of loneliness. Discussion: The author argues the neoliberal and stigmatizing undertones within the corpus may undermine efforts to combat loneliness. Further, austerity is silent in the dominant problematizations of loneliness, foreclosing upon alternatives that problematize loneliness as resulting from neoliberal policies that continue to dismantle public infrastructure and social care.

The Role of Solitude in the Politics of Sociability

Being Social. The Philosophy of Social Human Rights, 2022

This chapter explores a so-far neglected way of avoiding the bads of loneliness: by learning to value solitude, where that is understood as a state of 'keeping oneself company', as J. David Velleman puts it. Unlike loneliness, solitude need not involve any deprivation, whether subjective or objective. This chapter considers the various goods to which solitude is constitutive or instrumental, with a focus on the promise that proper valuing of solitude holds for combating loneliness. The overall argument is this: If loneliness significantly detracts from individual wellbeing, and if the ability to value solitude protects against loneliness, then such an ability is obviously valuable to human flourishing. If, further, loneliness raises concerns of justice, then supporting people's ability to value solitude is a way to implement a desideratum of justice. Individuals can cultivate their ability to value solitude, an ability that others can promote or hinder.

To sit quietly by oneself: on neoliberal capitalism's 'unprecedented inner loneliness'

Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2023

Building upon Max Weber's insightful critique of the capitalist spirit as causing 'unprecedented inner loneliness', this article traces the trajectory of a fraught subjectivity over the course of a socioeconomic order from the Protestant Reformation to the present. Beginning with the premise that this socioeconomic order has a long history of both inviting and foreclosing upon the capacity to have an inner life, the general argument is pursued that grappling with one's separateness, as well as the separateness of the object, gives rise to an inevitable sense of loneliness. This psychoanalytically informed sense of loneliness is juxtaposed with the gnawing loneliness that seems to haunt neoliberal subjectivity, revealing how the former might provide an imperfect but still viable antidote to our increasing inability to sit quietly by ourselves. Particular focus is given to re-evaluating Winnicott's notion of the capacity to be alone in light of cultivating a separate self. The article concludes with some tentative thoughts on what suffering a separate self might entail, including suffering one's inevitable loneliness.